ttered it, but he could see enough to decide on the direction he
should take to reach the heart of the place.

After many turnings he came up to the first ancient mediaeval pile
that he had encountered. It was a college, as he could see by the
gateway. He entered it, walked round, and penetrated to dark corners
which no lamplight reached. Close to this college was another; and
a little further on another; and then he began to be encircled as it
were with the breath and sentiment of the venerable city. When he
passed objects out of harmony with its general expression he allowed
his eyes to slip over them as if he did not see them.

A bell began clanging, and he listened till a hundred-and-one strokes
had sounded. He must have made a mistake, he thought: it was meant
for a hundred.

When the gates were shut, and he could no longer get into the
quadrangles, he rambled under the walls and doorways, feeling with
his fingers the contours of their mouldings and carving. The minutes
passed, fewer and fewer people were visible, and still he serpentined
among the shadows, for had he not imagined these scenes through
ten bygone years, and what mattered a night's rest for once? High
against the black sky the flash of a lamp would show crocketed
pinnacles and indented battlements. Down obscure alleys, apparently
never trodden now by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed
to be forgotten, there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels,
doorways of enriched and florid middle-age design, their extinct air
being accentuated by the rottenness of the stones. It seemed
impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit
and superseded chambers.

Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with
the isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the
sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself
seen or heard. He drew his breath pensively, and, seeming thus
almost his own ghost, gave his thoughts to the other ghostly
presences with which the nooks were haunted.

During the interval of preparation for this venture, since his wife
and furniture's uncompromising disappearance into space, he had read
and learnt almost all that could be read and learnt by one in his
position, of the worthies who had spent their youth within these
reverend walls, and whose souls had haunted them in their maturer
age. Some of them, by the accidents of his reading, loomed out in